A for-sale sign is an unassuming place to begin a bank’s next chapter. It has no marble lobby, no impressive title and very little room for a mission statement. Yet when Jim Holtkamp spoke at the March 2026 groundbreaking for ServisFirst Bank’s new Huntsville headquarters, that was where he began: his predecessor, Andy Kattos, passing a property, noticing the sign and picking up the telephone.
“Andy drove by and saw a for sale sign and got on the phone,” Holtkamp told the gathering. The story gave the occasion a pleasantly human scale. A headquarters can sound like the inevitable product of committees and drawings. Here, the first memorable detail was somebody looking out of a car window. Even a four-story ambition needs an address.
Holtkamp had become regional CEO only a few months earlier. On that patch of Meridian Street, he was describing a project that connected his predecessor’s initiative with his own responsibilities. The ceremonial shovels were useful props for a transition already under way: a banker with years inside the organization taking charge of its next stretch of work.
A promotion with a long memory
ServisFirst announced Holtkamp’s appointment as regional CEO for Huntsville and executive vice president on December 15, 2025. His remit reaches across North Alabama: regional banking strategy, expansion in commercial banking and growth built around clients. The geography matters. This is an assignment rooted in a particular place, with businesses and relationships that extend beyond a single office.
Huntsville is also his hometown. He attended Randolph School and earned his finance degree at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The word “regional” in his title therefore carries a personal connection as well as an organizational one. His education and professional life share a map. There is a continuity to that which a job title alone cannot quite convey.
“Huntsville is home for me,” he said when the appointment was announced. It is a compact statement, refreshingly free of management vocabulary. The responsibilities around it are substantial, but the sentence gives them a location. Home is where a regional strategy eventually has to become something recognizable to the people who live and work there.
“Huntsville is home for me.”
Jim Holtkamp · December 2025
Kattos remained involved in an advisory capacity and on the Huntsville Advisory Board, with oversight of the new building’s construction. That arrangement leaves room for institutional memory while the new CEO takes responsibility for the market. A leadership handoff can involve several kinds of continuity at once: clients, colleagues, unfinished projects and the practical knowledge of how a place works.
The lender before the title
Holtkamp joined ServisFirst in 2011. By 2022, when he was named an executive vice president, his work included commercial sales leadership and senior commercial lending for the Huntsville region. His portfolio covered commercial and industrial clients, government contractors and commercial real estate. These are specific, varied responsibilities, each requiring attention to what a business actually does.
The combination of lending and sales is worth pausing over. One side asks how a bank can win business. The other asks what the bank should agree to finance. A commercial banker has to keep both questions in view. Enthusiasm may open a conversation; the details still need to survive examination. A spreadsheet, inconveniently, does not become more persuasive because everyone enjoyed lunch.
Government contracting and commercial property also make different demands on a lender’s understanding. A company’s operating needs and a property project’s financing cannot be reduced to the same business story. The breadth of Holtkamp’s portfolio gives his later regional role some context: he came to it through the work of serving different kinds of commercial customers.
That experience helps explain the progression from senior lender and sales manager to responsibility for an entire region. It does not make every future decision predictable. It does show how the job widened: from individual relationships and portfolios toward the people, priorities and market direction surrounding them. The new title gathered those concerns into a larger assignment.
A city with plenty of bankers
The Huntsville assignment comes with competition. The city’s banking landscape has been attracting new names: Chase entered in 2023, Local Bank opened a branch in 2024, and Fifth Third opened its first Huntsville financial center in late 2025. Bank47 announced plans in February 2025 to establish its headquarters there. Familiarity with a market exists alongside fresh attempts to win it.
For a regional CEO, that makes the language of client relationships a working proposition. Customers have alternatives. A history in town may help begin a conversation, but a bank’s service still has to justify the next one. The interesting question is how an established local team keeps earning attention while other institutions are busy introducing themselves.
Holtkamp’s civic involvement places him in another set of local conversations. The Huntsville/Madison County Chamber lists him among its board members. Its board brings together people from banking, manufacturing, engineering, defense and other businesses. Such a room offers a wider view of a city than any single loan portfolio can provide. The industries coexist long before their representatives sit down together.
He is also a member of the Huntsville Committee of 100 and has completed Connect, Leadership Management Academy and Flagship, the three Huntsville leadership programs named in his appointment announcement. Alongside Alabama Banking School, those programs add a civic strand to his professional preparation. His résumé keeps returning to the same region, through different doors.
The next banker at the next desk
A regional bank’s future also arrives through junior roles. Jonathan Ceci joined ServisFirst as an intern in 2022, became a full-time credit analyst after graduating in 2023 and advanced to assistant relationship manager and banking officer in June 2025. In that role, his portfolio work supported Holtkamp and Elizabeth Feick. The reporting relationship puts a younger banker directly into this story.
In March 2026, Ceci became a commercial banking officer while continuing to help the credit department with underwriting. Holtkamp welcomed the promotion, emphasizing Ceci’s service to clients, colleagues and the community. Those three groups form a fairly practical description of a banking career: people bringing business in, people doing the work together and the place around them.
Ceci’s progress offers a useful counterpoint to the CEO appointment. An organization needs experienced people to take larger jobs, and it needs people learning how to do the jobs below them. The two developments belong in the same account. A succession story confined to the most senior office leaves out much of the machinery.
During 2026, the Huntsville credit team also added Emerson Herr, Grace Minor and Alex Ahearn as analysts. Herr brought experience in commercial insurance; Minor and Ahearn had previously interned at the bank. Their work centers on financial analysis and underwriting. Behind the visible expansion is this quieter investment in the people who examine a business before a lending decision is made.
There is an appealing lack of ceremony in the analyst’s part of the business. A headquarters earns a groundbreaking. Financial analysis earns another question, another document and another careful look at the numbers. For a leader whose earlier responsibilities included senior lending, that work sits close to the substance of the job. A bank can announce growth in a sentence; building the capacity to assess the business that follows takes people, experience and time. The new recruits make that less visible side of expansion tangible.
Room for the next conversation
The headquarters gives that expanding operation a physical setting. Announced in March 2026, the planned building at 515 Meridian Street North has four stories and approximately 25,000 square feet. It is designed to accommodate about 50 banking professionals. Completion was scheduled for 2027, making it a project in progress rather than an achievement already delivered.
Office space · Community room · Flexible meeting areas · Covered rooftop patio
Fite Building Company is constructing the facility, with design by Matheny Goldmon Architecture + Interiors. A community room, flexible meeting areas and a covered rooftop patio are part of the plan. It is easy to describe a bank building in terms of its dimensions. The more revealing part may be how much of the description concerns people gathering inside it.
The patio is a particularly agreeable detail. Banking architecture has spent a great deal of history trying to look immovable. Here there will also be somewhere to step outside. Views toward downtown and Monte Sano Mountain place the building within the city Holtkamp calls home. The setting supplies its own reminder of what lies beyond the balance sheet.
For Holtkamp, the immediate story is a collection of responsibilities already in motion: a regional leadership role, colleagues advancing, analysts joining and a headquarters taking shape. The connection between them is the everyday work of keeping an institution useful to its customers. The building will eventually have doors to open. The relationships have been under construction for years.